Electricity has been a boon for humanity. And the cozy candles that many participants will light, which seem so natural and environmentally friendly, are still fossil fuels (paraffin comes from petroleum) —and almost 100 times less efficient than incandescent light bulbs.

Are you aware of this? Is it true that 60 minutes all lights off will help Mother Earth?

Maddus MattusMaddus on C9, Is often ​controversi​al, But fun ​none-the-​less -​evildictait​or

Light off 60 minutes will help power plants to determine the minimum level of electricity needed.

For Hong Kong, I don't think it'd help much though, as our electricity company will sell any excess electricity to ShenZhen, there's simply no incentive for them to generate less power.

Then again as I've said before, for any fossil fuel burning power plant, it require more fuel to spin up the stalled turbine than to keep it spinning for an hour. So if they want there be real help to mother earth, they should tell people to switch off things for more than half days, and after that EP folks can have real argument to ask power plants to burn less fuel for that day.

I will also note that if CO2 really and truly was / is a problem, the effects / affects would be on humans a few hundred years from now, whereupon some of them might have to move a little bit further away from the coasts due to sea level rise. The earth itself should be just fine.

Mother earth will continue to spin around the sun, as it has done for billions of years.

Venus is both the closest planet to Earth and the planet closest in size to Earth. It has a similar size, gravity, and bulk composition to Earth.

Despite being further from the Sun than Mercury, Venus is by far the hottest planet in the Solar System due to it's atmosphere of carbon dioxide. It has no carbon cycle to lock carbon back into rocks and surface features, nor does it seem to have any organic life to absorb it in biomass. Venus may have possessed oceans in the past, but these would have vaporized as the temperature rose due to the runaway greenhouse effect.

Studies have suggested that billions of years ago, the Venusian atmosphere was much more like Earth's than it is now, and that there may have been substantial quantities of liquid water on the surface, but, after a period of 600 million to several billion years, a runaway greenhouse effect was caused by the evaporation of that original water, which generated a critical level of greenhouse gases in its atmosphere. Although the surface conditions on the planet are no longer hospitable to any Earthlike life that may have formed prior to this event, the possibility that a habitable niche still exists in the lower and middle cloud layers of Venus can not yet be excluded.

So in conclusion, Maddus, you're right. Even with runaway Global Warming, Venus still orbits the Sun. Not sure I'd want to live there though.

"Despite the harsh conditions on the surface, the atmospheric pressure and temperature at about 50 km to 65 km above the surface of the planet is nearly the same as that of the Earth"

So, we can find earth like conditions on Venus, it's just a matter of how far deep we plunge into the planet. If we plunge deeper into the earth we can find higher temperatures as wel,. No greenhouse theory that applies there. Same with Mars.

We can conclude that the mass of the atmosphere determines the temperature on the surface and not some greenhouse effect.

Science threads are interesting to me too. Just maybe not so interesting for those who are not interested.

IMO climate change is a real concern, but there's no point to "just do something" without considering whether it'll actually help or not.

Motivating people cost you their "consideration" and "inconvenience" and they are also "limited resource" for most people (depleted people will become less likely to join future "save our earth" events). It's wrong to "waste" them for no good reason.

Take this "Earth Hour" campaign for example. If you think about how power plants' fuel consumption works, you'll know it has no direct impact on lowering CO2 level. However it's always good to remind people that we should save electricity, and I'll comment that it's an effective activity in that sense.

Take this "Earth Hour" campaign for example. If you think about how power plants' fuel consumption works, you'll know it has no direct impact on lowering CO2 level. However it's always good to remind people that we should save electricity, and I'll comment that it's an effective activity in that sense.

I'm not sure that anyone seriously thinks that Earth Hour is the solution to climate change, or that it makes an important difference to our annual CO2 output. It's clearly a campaign to raise awareness.

People saying that "Earth hour does not directly reduce CO2, therefore they are 'fraud warriors'" or "Earth Hour didn't reduce emissions, therefore we shouldn't try and reduce energy consumption at all because it makes no difference" is about as intellectually honest as saying "I watched a monkey for a whole hour, and he didn't evolve into a human, therefore evolution doesn't happen".